Hello All, I have a question regarding power amps.Would they help in the over all sound of my home thearter? I have a onkyo 705 with m80's vp150 center, qs8's and 350 sub. I been reading in other forums that people who got a power amp made their home theater kick.What are some good amps for about 500 dollars?thanks to all of you for your help. How do put pictures onto the website? thanks again The sound sounds good but i feel it could be better?

Depends what you want to believe. Are you currently unhappy with the volumes you can reach with your current receiver? Are you hearing distortion of sound from clipping because your receiver does not have enough power?

If your current receiver has enough power for you to listen at the volumes you want, more available power won't do anything for you.

I am in a smallish room and don't listen crazy loud,so I have never even come close to using all the power my receiver can put out.

Fred

-------Blujays1: Spending Fred's money one bottle at a time, no two... Oh crap!

To use pictures here, create an account on a site like photobucket.com, then upload your pictures in a smallish size to it. It will provide you with a link you can copy here that begins with [img] and ends with [/img].

Look to the used market for some good amps in that price range, Anthem, Rotel, NAD, to name a few. You can also check out Outlaw Audio, they offer some nice amps and since you own M80s you could try Emotiva but ther have been a few with M80s having problems with Emotiva's amps and M80s, but there are a number that are using them with no problems, so YMMV.

I'm starting the like the idea of a seperate amp for another reason. I just got very nice av reciever - too much $ - with very nice internal amplifier(s). But what happens to that unit when its HDMI inputs/outputs are the equivilent of the VHS tape. ~that will probably be sooner than I care to think about right now.

An alternative would be to get a nice external amp - maybe a two channel for left and right speakers (or a pair of mono blocks for the same purpose). A good amp will last a long, long time.

So as recievers are replaced due to features, I'll be able to rely on the extrnal amp to power some or all of your speakers.

This is one of the most valid points made towards power amps. Power supply has changed very, very little over the years as compared to other features in the AV world. Sure thre are digital amps now a days, but you can still power any speaker with the same amp you bought in the 70's as well. So when it comes time to upgrading, why repurchase the amps inside the reciever? If as you said you purchase a nice power amp (or two, three, etc...) and either a fairly economical reciever (read - not so beefy amp section) or a pre-pro, then when your reciever/pre-pro becomes outdated, as we in this hobby know all too well happens in the blink of an eye, then you don't have to make such a large investment to catch back up.

This was actually one of my main motivations towards my Emotiva purchase. My Denon was sadly out of date, and only falling further behind. When I purchased it I spent almost $2000 dollars so that I could have a pretty hefty amp section included. I didn't want to have to spend another $2000 bucks on another Denon just to get an extra 10 - 20 watts per channel when I could buy an amp that pushes 400 watts per channel for a quarter of that price and then look for either a much more reasonable reciever, or possibly a pre-pro.